A collection of fungi maintained by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) played a crucial role in helping scientists identify the specific fungus causing an anthracnose disease discovered in a southern turf grass, and another fungus destroying trees of edible fruits in Honduras. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Phys.org
By The Huffington Post News Editors
By Mike Slane, Goal.com
DALLAS – There’s no stopping Landon Donovan.
The LA Galaxy star had a pair of goals and an assist to guide the Americans to a convincing 3-1 victory over Honduras in the Gold Cup semifinals at Cowboy Stadium on Wednesday night.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Huffington Post
USA vs Honduras takes place in the CONCACAF Gold Cup 2013 semifinals on Wednesday night in the first of today’s “last-four” match ups. …read more
Source: The Christian Post
Two thousand American missionaries visited every capital city in Honduras this past Saturday to preach the Gospel and proclaim the emergence of a new nation. The nonprofit organization Missions.Me organized the massive event called “One Nation One Day,” which was legally declared a national holiday by President Porfirio Lobo-Sosa. …read more
Source: The Christian Post
A college student from New Jersey says she was stranded at sea for 16 hours while swimming off Honduras and is now safe. Heather Barnes went to collect coral samples for a project she’s doing at New College of Florida at 4am Friday when she says she started to cramp… …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Newser – Home
KRISTEN BUTLER, UPI.com
Marine biology student collecting coral samples in Honduras was swept out to sea for 16 hours. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at UPI Odd News
A college student from southern New Jersey is safe after she got stranded at sea for 16 hours while swimming off Honduras.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox US News
1850 – 1st public demonstration of ice made by refrigeration
1946 – Dr Ben Spock’s “Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care” published
1949 – USSR explodes their 1st atom bomb
1958 – Col Saddam Hussein and Iraqi army overthrows the monarchy
1969 – “Futbol War” between El Salvador and Honduras begins
1985 – Last USFL game-Baltimore Stars defeats Oakland Invaders, 28-24
1910 – William Hanna, Melrose New Mexico, animator (Hanna-Barbera- Tom and Jerry, Scooby Doo), (d. 2001)
1930 – Eric Norman Stokes, composer
1938 – Bob Scholl, rocker (Mellow Kings)
1951 – Esther Dyson, Zurich Switz, computer publisher (Release 1.0)
1971 – Marie-Chantal Toupin, French Canadian singer
1977 – Victoria, Crown Princess of Sweden
1298 – Jacob de Voragine, Italian bishop/writer (Golden Legend), dies
1876 – Thomas Hazlehurst, English Methodist chapel builder (b. 1816)
1923 – Louis Ganne, composer, dies at 61
1959 – Grock, [Adrien Wettach], Swiss clown/circus director, dies at 79
1994 – Robert Jungk, German/French/Us/Austrian philosopher/historian, dies
2003 – Éva Janikovszky, Hungarian novelist (b. 1926)
Source: FULL ARTICLE at HistoryOrb.Com – This Day in History
Paraguay is poised to elect as its new president a conservative candidate from the party that backed strongman Alfredo Stroessner during 35 years of iron rule, returning the executive branch to the wealthy interests that have traditionally dominated this poor South American nation despite the election of a leftist ex-bishop in 2008.
Sunday’s vote is also an important milestone in Paraguay‘s attempt to regain the international acceptance it lost when neighboring nations objected to the fast-track removal of President Fernando Lugo. The expedited impeachment of Lugo last year conformed to Paraguay‘s constitution but was criticized by its neighbors as an “institutional coup” that threatened democracies around the region.
Regional blocs such as Mercosur suspended Paraguay‘s membership following Lugo’s ouster, but all signs indicate that Paraguay‘s neighbors will re-engage the country after the election to replace Federico Franco, who served out Lugo’s term and is not eligible to seek a new one.
Most polls indicate that tobacco magnate and soccer executive Horacio Cartes of the Colorado Party, which held power for 61 years before losing to Lugo at the polls, will win handily over his chief rival, Sen. Efrain Alegre of Franco’s Liberal Party.
A handful of candidates trail them, including Anibal Carrillo of the leftist Guasu Front coalition led by Lugo, who is seeking to return to politics as a senator.
A presidential candidate can be declared winner with a plurality, and there is no runoff.
Some likened the vote to the 2009 presidential election in Honduras that gave other nations reason to re-embrace the Central American country five months after President Manuel Zelaya was grabbed by soldiers while still in his pajamas and flown to Costa Rica.
“The election in Honduras ultimately was important,” said Gregory Weeks, a political scientist specializing in Latin America at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. “It was contested and there might have been controversy, but what it did was it got the country sufficiently past the crisis to allow it to be accepted by all the rest of the region again.”
Whoever wins in Paraguay will have to deal with problems that have been endemic for decades in this landlocked nation of about 6.2 million people, most notably the yawning gulf between the haves and have-nots.
Paraguay is South America’s No. 3 producer of soy,
From: http://feeds.foxnews.com/~r/foxnews/world/~3/h9F-0S00j3Y/
Honduras‘ top anti-money-laundering prosecutor has been shot to death, a prosecution spokesman said Friday.
Spokesman Carlos Vallecillo says prosecutor Orlan Arturo Chavez was killed in his truck as he returned from the National University, where he also taught.
Vallecillo said the killing was carried out in a manner now depressingly familiar in Honduras, which has one of the world’s highest homicide rates: Two gunmen riding a motorcycle pulled up beside Chavez’s truck and shot him through the window.
Chavez’s brother, Miguel Angel, said Chavez had received death threats in telephone calls.
Chavez, 52, was the third top prosecutor killed in Honduras since 2009.
Assistant Attorney General Roy Urtecho told the HRN radio station that the majority of Honduran judges and prosecutors don’t have security details.
“It is time for us to recognize we need to invest in security measures for justice system personnel,” he said.
Honduran prosecutors are under fire on several fronts.
On Tuesday, congress voted to suspend Utrecho and Attorney General Luis Rubi and appoint an oversight committee to shake up the country’s notoriously deficient law enforcement.
With a homicide rate of 91 per 100,000 residents, Honduras is often called the most violent country in the world. Prosecutors solve only about 20 percent of homicide cases.
.
From: http://feeds.foxnews.com/~r/foxnews/world/~3/blSHqrlk1EE/
The Honduran congress has voted to suspend the country’s attorney general and his assistants and appoint an oversight committee to shake up the country’s notoriously deficient law enforcement.
With a homicide rate of 91 per 100,000 residents, Honduras is often called the most violent country in the world. Prosecutors solve only about 20 percent of homicide cases, on average.
Congress voted late Tuesday to relieve Attorney General Luis Alberto Rubi of his duties, and appoint a commission to take over the prosecutor’s office for 60 days.
The five-member commission will be made up of three civic activists and two politicians.
Congressional leader Juan Hernandez says the effort is aimed at improving prosecutors’ work. Congress estimates 20,644 homicides have gone uninvestigated in the 28 months of the current administration.
From: http://feeds.foxnews.com/~r/foxnews/world/~3/njNKBJYeCXY/
The main airport for Honduras‘ capital has been closed for several hours because smoke from forest fires reduced visibility.
Civil aviation agency spokesman Ezequiel Oliva says visibility fell to about 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) during the closure Saturday.
The Toncontin airport outside Tegucigalpa was closed for about four hours, affecting about 500 passengers.
Almost a hundred fires have burned in the pine-covered hills around the capital this week. Four such closures have affected Toncontin and two other airports in the space of a month.
From: http://feeds.foxnews.com/~r/foxnews/world/~3/WZwz5W2rkVI/
By Dan Caplinger, The Motley Fool
Filed under: Investing
Spring is finally here, and a new earnings season is right around the corner. Next Tuesday, PriceSmart will release its latest quarterly results. The key to making smart investment decisions on stocks reporting earnings is to anticipate how they’ll do before they announce results, leaving you fully prepared to respond quickly to whatever inevitable surprises arise. That way, you’ll be less likely to make an uninformed knee-jerk reaction to news that turns out to be exactly the wrong move.
PriceSmart isn’t a name you’ll see in the U.S., but the company has taken the warehouse-club model south of the border and turned it into a thriving business throughout Latin America and Caribbean. Can the company keep up its growth pace? Let’s take an early look at what’s been happening with PriceSmart over the past quarter and what we’re likely to see in its quarterly report on Tuesday.
Stats on PriceSmart
|
Analyst EPS Estimate |
$0.77 |
|
Change From Year-Ago EPS |
15% |
|
Revenue Estimate |
$609.7 million |
|
Change From Year-Ago Revenue |
10.9% |
|
Earnings Beats in Past 4 Quarters |
2 |
Source: Yahoo! Finance.
Is PriceSmart’s stock a good bargain?
Analysts have had mixed views on PriceSmart recently, reining in their estimates for the most recent quarter by a penny per share but boosting their full-year fiscal 2013 consensus by $0.03 per share. The stock has also had a tepid performance, with share prices up less than 3% since the beginning of 2013.
Given PriceSmart’s business model, investors inevitably make comparisons with U.S. warehouse king Costco and its hugely successful business model of reaping the bulk of its profit from membership fees. Right now, PriceSmart looks a lot like Costco did 25 years ago, with rapidly growing sales but plenty of untapped potential. For PriceSmart, that potential could come from southward expansion into key South American markets such as Brazil, as the company thus far has concentrated on the Caribbean and Central America for most of its stores.
Source: PriceSmart investor relations.
But competition may be coming for PriceSmart. Last month, Wal-Mart got environmental approval for a store in Costa Rica, directly challenging PriceSmart’s home territory.
Still, for now, PriceSmart has kept itself growing at a strong pace. In February, the company reported an 8% increase in sales with a jump in same-store comps of almost 9%. With the announcement of a new club coming to Honduras next year, PriceSmart remains on a steady path to growing its presence throughout the region.
In its earnings report, watch for PriceSmart to discuss its longer-term plans for expansion. With the prospects that Brazil could bring the company, investors won’t want PriceSmart to wait too long before making its move southward.
PriceSmart is smart to follow Costco’s path, as its low prices haven’t just benefited customers — shares have walloped the market, returning 11,000% over the past two decades. However, with …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance
By Brian Stoffel, The Motley Fool
Filed under: Investing
It’s been almost 23 months since I introduced the World’s Greatest Retirement Portfolio to Foolish readers. This was, has been, and will continue to be my way of helping the world to invest better. Putting my money where my mouth is, I pledged to put at least $4,000 behind each stock and attempt to hold each one for at least three years — though I’ve already broken that promise.
Since I began, the market has returned 24.1%, which is pretty darn good by historical measures. Though this portfolio has been outperforming the market by double digits for well over a year now, it is currently ahead by just 3.3 percentage points.
Read below to see why the margin between the two is narrowing, and at the end, I’ll offer up access to a special premium report on one of these 10 companies.
|
Company |
Publication Date |
Change |
Vs. S&P 500 |
|---|---|---|---|
|
|
64.4% |
38 |
|
|
PriceSmart |
56.7% |
31 |
|
|
Baidu |
(20.8%) |
(44) |
|
|
Intuitive Surgical |
22.4% |
1 |
|
|
National Oilwell Varco |
(11.8%) |
(37) |
|
|
Coca-Cola |
28.1% |
3 |
|
|
Whole Foods |
40.3% |
19 |
|
|
Amazon.com |
26.1% |
3 |
|
|
Apple |
33.8% |
11 |
|
|
Johnson & Johnson |
34.7% |
8 |
|
Source: Fool.com. All numbers accurate as of market close March 31, 2013. *Returns are for position in ATVI held from July 15, 2011, to Sept. 9, 2012, and transferred over to BIDU on Sept. 15, 2012.
One company that can’t catch a break
More or less, the companies in this portfolio didn’t perform terribly during the month of March, they just weren’t able to keep pace with the S&P 500, which climbed over 3% during the month. That wasn’t the case, however, for Intuitive Surgical , maker of the da Vinci surgical robot.
I’ve covered the stock’s dive already, but there are three simple events that caused the stock to drop. First, the Journal of the American Medical Association questioned the need for robotic hysterectomies. Second, the FDA announced it was investigating a rise in the company’s incidents reports. Finally, the president of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists publicly echoed the concerns raised in the JAMA article.
Three companies having a good month
Even though the portfolio as a whole isn’t leading the market by quite as much, three stocks had a relatively good March.
Shares of Latin American club wholesaler PriceSmart were up 5%. This came on the heels of the announcement that the company’s net sales increased 7.8% during the month of February, which included an impressive 8.9% increase in same-store sales. PriceSmart also announced it has acquired land in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, to open up its third store in the country.
The total return from my investments in Coca-Cola and Johnson & Johnson also increased markedly during March. Part of this was due to the fact that Coke issued its quarterly dividend …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance
San Pedro Sula, Honduras named 'most dangerous place on earth'...
(Second column, 16th story, link)
…read more
Source: Drudge Report
By Alex Planes, The Motley Fool
Filed under: Investing
On this day in economic and financial history …
The United Fruit Company was formed on March 30, 1899, the result of a merger between the nearly bankrupt Tropical Trading and Transport Company and Boston Fruit. On its formation, United Fruit was already a giant in its field, with railroads, steamships, and plantations spread across the tropics. It would grow into an enterprise that clashed with governments. The phrase “banana republic” arose from United Fruit‘s efforts to bend entire Central American nations to its purposes, particularly in the growing of bananas, which are notoriously quick to rot and thus require greater control over their production to ensure a uniform — and profitable — product.
In Reason, Ira Stoll recently recounted the company’s sheer size:
It seems almost quaint to think that a company specializing in bananas might have once been considered a capitalist giant on the level of today’s firms, but so it was — at its height in the first half of the last century, United Fruit owned one of the largest private navies in the world. It owned 50% of the private land in Honduras and 70% of all private land and every mile of railroad in Guatemala.
The company’s transformation of the banana trade was a key element of Peter Chapman’s Bananas, which a New York Times article on United Fruit covered in 2008:
“[United Fruit was] more powerful than many nation states … a law unto itself and accustomed to regarding the republics as its private fiefdom.” United Fruit essentially invented not only “the concept and reality of the banana republic,” but also, as Chapman shows, the concept and reality of the modern banana. “If it weren’t for United Fruit,” he observes, “the banana would never have emerged from the dark, then arrived in such quantities as to bring prices that made it available to all.”
Today, “the banana is the world’s fourth major food, after rice, wheat, and milk.” But when a Brooklyn-born twentysomething named Minor Keith planted a few banana cuttings next to a railroad track in Costa Rica in the early 1870s, it was virtually unknown outside its native environs. … Until its demise a hundred years later, United Fruit controlled as much as 90 percent of the market.
United Fruit was fictionalized in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and managed to take part in multiple political uprisings and fiascos, including the “banana massacre” in 1928 Colombia and the 1954 Guatemalan coup d’etat. On both occasions, U.S. military forces intervened in Central America on the company’s behalf. United reached its apex in the years bookending World War II, after Sam “Banana Man” Zemurray took the reins — United Fruit‘s overextension before the Great Depression had jeopardized the wealth he’d gained from selling United his competing fruit company, prompting a takeover bid.
United Fruit became United Brands in 1970 and is now Chiquita …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance
The US Men’s National Team’s win against Costa Rica on Friday night may have occurred under some unique circumstances, but it was a win nonetheless. It gave them a much-needed boost in their quest for a seventh straight World Cup final, with their likelihood of doing so only standing at 53% after their opening match loss to Honduras according to ESPN.com’s Soccer Power Index (SPI) . A quick Clint Dempsey goal against Costa Rica with some non-ideal weather slowing down play later in the match gave the US Men’s National Team their first three points of the Hexagonal and vaulted them to a nearly 69% chance of qualifying for Brazil 2014 (Costa Rica protest notwithstanding). Everyone knew this was the warmup fight ahead of the main event with fellow CONCACAF heavyweight Mexico on Tuesday night, but it was an warmup that had to be won to keep US hopes alive. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
The U.S. State Department, which spends millions of taxpayer dollars a year on the Honduran National Police, has assured Congress that money only goes to specially vetted and trained units that don’t operate under the direct supervision of a police chief once accused of extrajudicial killings and “social cleansing.”
But The Associated Press has found that all police units are under the control of Director General Juan Carlos Bonilla, nicknamed the “Tiger,” who in 2002 was accused of three extrajudicial killings and links to 11 more deaths and disappearances. He was tried on one killing and acquitted. The rest of the cases were never fully investigated.
Honduran law prohibits any police unit from operating outside the command of the director general, according to a top Honduran government security official, who would only speak on condition of anonymity. He said that is true in practice as well as on paper.
Celso Alvarado, a criminal law professor and consultant to the Honduran Commission for Security and Justice Sector Reform, said the same.
“Every police officer in Honduras, regardless of their specific functions, is under the hierarchy and obedience of the director general,” he said.
The official line from Honduras, however, is that the money does not go to Bonilla.
“The security programs that Honduras is implementing with the United States are under control of the ministers of security and defense,” said Foreign Minister Arturo Corrales, who negotiates the programs with the State Department.
But the security official attributed the contradiction to the politics necessary in a country in the grip of a security emergency.
With 91 murders per 100,000 people, the small Central American nation is often called the most violent in the world. An estimated 40 percent of the cocaine headed to the U.S. — and 87 percent of cocaine smuggling flights from South America — pass through Honduras, according to the State Department.
The allegations against Bonilla, along with other concerns about police and military killings, prompted the U.S. Congress to freeze an estimated $30 million in Honduran aid last August. Most has been restored under agreements with the U.S. Department of State over the monitoring of Honduran operations receiving U.S. money.
The agreement doesn’t specifically mention …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox World News
This Friday the U.S. Men’s National Soccer Team will play Costa Rica in Commerce City, Colorado. Four days later, they will travel to Mexico City to take on Mexico. The matches are part of the final round of World Cup qualifying in the CONCACAF region. Because the U.S. team lost its first qualifying match (1-2 to Honduras) and now are in last place in the six-team group, these two matches are absolutely critical to the team’s chances of advancing to the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
On their daily cable car rides to and from home in Venezuela‘s capital, Maria Gonzalez and Jose Rafael Suarez soar in a bubble of safety far above the deadly, trash-strewn streets below.
Untouchable for 17 minutes, they peer at the expanse of dank, narrow alleys and the zinc roofs of shanties, some built four stories tall. Stray bullets and thugs on motorcycles fly through the streets, and people scurry home as soon as night falls.
“There are a lot of kids in the street using drugs, with guns,” said Gonzalez while riding the newly inaugurated cable car one afternoon to the plastics factory where she and Suarez work.
Her 27-year-old friend gazed down at the sea of slum roofs.
“It’s very hard to change all this,” he said.
That frustration defines this 28-million-person country, which has seen shootings, kidnappings and other crime infiltrate every aspect of daily life. Whole neighborhoods that used to buzz with street life are abandoned at night, while foreign diplomats and working-class Venezuelans alike fall prey to so-called express kidnappings that whisk victims away to the nearest cash machines.
Amid a list of woes, including double-digit inflation and crumbling infrastructure, rampant crime is seen by many as the main failing of the late President Hugo Chavez‘s government, and one that a whole swath of this shell-shocked country has lost hope of correcting.
Just last week, the U.N. Development Program found that Venezuela suffered the world’s fifth highest homicide rate, with 45 out of every 100,000 people killed in 2010, trailing only Honduras, El Salvador, the Ivory Coast and Jamaica. The nonprofit Venezuelan Violence Observatory estimates the homicide rate was much higher last year, at 73 per 100,000 people.
That murder rate has doubled since 1999, when Chavez was first elected president, officials say. And kidnappings increased 26-fold from 1999 to 2011, according to a study by the civic group Active Peace, which studies safety issues.
The government not only can’t rein in the problem, it won’t even say how bad it is. Officials stopped releasing official crime statistics in 2005, leaving it to nonprofit groups to sort through the casualties.
“I calculate that 20 to 25 years back, we had a problem that was moderate to …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox World News
![Florida student survives 16 hours stranded at sea [VIDEO]](http://bd.summit.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/411366-thumb.jpg)
